They confuse the two, because the average consumer doesn't know anything beyond iPhone. They think all phones are iPhones. When someone owns one of the more popular alternatives, the question I always get asked, "is that an iPhone?"Reply

When I had the SGS2 a lot of people around me asked if that was the new iPhone. But most of them thought that iPhone was a generic term like "PC" or "Console".I now have a Galaxy Nexus and find it and the new Samsung phones to be just as attractive.Reply

I am amazed by the constant artsy fartsy droning on how a device looks, and how all people are expected to agree, with of course, the iPhone as the "beautiful one". Of course it's brainwashing, just like all the lemmings want their computer parts and cases black - a thousand websites all have the drones exclaiming the same thing - black black black.

So, anything BUT the sad sorry rectangle of the iPhone is great by me. It's a freaking rectangle - and worse yet, the stupid public pubes in charge of the PC worshipping of a rectangle always claim thinner is also better.

Thinner is not better, especially when gripping. It's better in their lemming brainwashed gourds and not IRL, but their estrogen doused public opinion persona would have them believing anything peer pressure desired them to, so of course we have that thin to win crazed insanity everywhere as well.

It's a freakin rectangle. That's super, superior styling to these god for saken morons - it's amazing they can even drool.Reply

Preservance a professional <a href=" http://preservancetech.com/our-services/web-design... Designing</a> company based in the capital city of India that offers various services for website designing from a static website to CMS driven website to any open source website development to complete e-commerce site to travel portal. Reply

Preservance a professional <a href=" http://preservancetech.com/our-services/web-design... Designing</a> company based in the capital city of India that offers various services for website designing from a static website to CMS driven website to any open source website development to complete e-commerce site to travel portal. Reply

It is much more than that. Anyone who paid any attention to the trial knows that Samsung had pages and pages showing the iPhone interface and the S 2 interface which it clearly said to copy as closely as possible. But the Android kids want to be ignorant and trot out the Samsung line that is just about being a rectangle.Reply

The way I got my home screen set up, nobody has ever asked if it is an iPhone, as there's no rows of icons to see, and given the Samoled's black values, you can't even see where the screen ends if your background is set to black.Reply

I guess Samsung didn't consider what would be aesthetically pleasing to someone who would choose a screen name like "jigglywiggly". :D

Seriously though, just like I'd never be caught using a screen name for a site like yours, there is nothing wrong with your choice, and there is nothing wrong with the looks of the Note II here. You just don't like it. That's fine, but please try not to talk as though you are the arbiter of beauty; you're not.

Preservance a professional <a href=" http://preservancetech.com/our-services/web-design... Designing</a> company based in the capital city of India that offers various services for website designing from a static website to CMS driven website to any open source website development to complete e-commerce site to travel portal. Reply

Likewise, thanks for the great review, Brian. This phone has been on my upgrade short list and I can't wait to take it for a spin in a store soon. I've tried the Note and the SIII but I definitely need to see how the two meld together, as it were. :-)

I wish the numbers for cellular browsing were a little higher, since that's my primary use for a phone and I want to know I can get a full day out of a phone without compromise. I don't know if my Atrix 4G just has really crummy battery life, or if I have unreasonable expectations for smartphones...

I'm also really curious now that you've mentioned the HDR stills...I do enjoy the convenience of taking pictures with a device I always have on me, and just last weekend I really wished I had something with more dynamic range. If the HDR feature works well, that would be another strong mark in it's favor.Reply

I've been using a Note 2 in the UK for a couple of weeks now - it routinely lasts for 2 days with all radios and GPS left enabled, a couple of hours worth of browsing, a little gameplay (World of Goo, nothing too stressful), some voice use and a lot of texting. It's currently at 66% after coming off charge at 8am, time now is 10pm. I'm writing this on it now.

Point is, it lasts very well! I'm a little surprised by the unexceptional battery life readings in the charts here, but I suspect it's disproportionately affected by the relatively dim screen compared with contemporary phones. 200nits is near maximum on this thing, whereas I rarely go above 50% brightness. Not a flaw with the test so much as an advisory that the battery life will probably get hammered in bright ambient lighting. Similarly, mobile reception in the UK tends to be better. I reckon a full day's heavy use is hardly a stretch though!Reply

I've been using a Note 2 in the UK for a couple of weeks now - it routinely lasts for 2 days with all radios and GPS left enabled, a couple of hours worth of browsing, a little gameplay (World of Goo, nothing too stressful), some voice use and a lot of texting. It's currently at 66% after coming off charge at 8am, time now is 10pm. I'm writing this on it now.

Point is, it lasts very well! I'm a little surprised by the unexceptional battery life readings in the charts here, but I suspect it's disproportionately affected by the relatively dim screen compared with contemporary phones. 200nits is near maximum on this thing, whereas I rarely go above 50% brightness. Not a flaw with the test so much as an advisory that the battery life will probably get hammered in bright ambient light :)Reply

Heh, that's all right. Thanks for the reassurance. :-) I'm pretty sure my Atrix 4G is jacked up; it hardly ever gets to 100% charge and is often at 30% or less by the time I leave work (and it's not like I spend all day dicking around on it).

There's a lot that I want to like about this phone and I'm hoping I can snag it at something a bit less than $299 subsidized. I'll have to see what happens when it's finally released. And I'll probably have to wait to check out the Lumia 920, which is smaller(?), claims to have an awesome camera(+?), but has a sealed battery(-!)...Reply

Yeah, that price is rather extortionate! Again, UK pricing, but I paid £60 up-front plus £36 a month for 24 months. It's the most I've ever paid for a phone and probably ever would pay again, but my old Motorola Defy was having similar troubles to your Atrix so I threw caution to the wind.

It's really a matter of taste, and your own size. I'm 6" with large hands, and frankly, adjusting from a 4.3" HD2 to a GNote1 took me half a day.

I got the same snide remarks I got about my HD2, so I'm sure the fashion police will be able to eat their words with the same gusto in a year or two when that size becomes standard and accepted. I'm using a headset all the time anyway, so I don't get the "shovel stuck to ear" look too often.

The Gnote fits in my shirt and front pants pockets (I'm too afraid of sitting on it if I put it in the back), I can handle it one-handed (barely). My asian friends can't say the same though ^^Reply

Hmmm, I'm asian, 5'10" but I have really long fingers(Great for those mandatory music lessons every asian american has to take). I have no problem using a screen that size in one hand for most tasks. Can't wait to pick up the gnote 2 on AT&T.Reply

It's not only about the size of your hands. Actually, my wife (yes, with very small hands) was eyeing the Note 2 ever since it was announced. Her love for it grew each time she saw a video review or one of those Samsung promotional ads.

I've tried to convince her otherwise countless times, since I thought it would be unpractical and very hard to manage, especially since her previous Galaxy S2 would slip from her hand and drop on regular basis.

She has one now, for almost a week. She describes the device in 5 words; "best phone she ever owned". She loves the screen, battery life, functionality, S-Pen, and call quality/reception. She doesn't want a tablet anymore, I guess that says something.

There's something about the Galaxy Note series that makes you either love it or hate it, and for those who love it, they do with a passion. I personally think it's a great phone, but it would have to be the ONLY phone on my carrier for me to consider one.... Oh well, at least the device have taken a good chunk of her "free time" that otherwise would have me in focus, lol.Reply

As a 44yr old, I'm getting my phones purely on screen size (and still zooming in quite a bit...). It's nice to see a reviewer able to put himself in others' shoes for once ^^ Screen legibility in bright light *and* at night, for which AMOLED is very good, are also important. LCDs glow in the dark in the worst way.

I have a Note1, and I'm so happy with it I think I'll skip the 2, especially since the 3 should come around ext summer. Review such as this one make me hitch, though.Reply

Don't worry, I'm 40 years old myself and screen specs are very important for me due to my aging eyes. I've since replaced all my LCDs with 30" IPS ones, e-readers and tablets have at least x800 and now this phone if I decide to buy one (if pricing is right).

I was glad to read that statement in the review as well. It definitely put a smile onto my face to actually read it and have someone share the perspective. Mind you my eyes aren't too bad being .75 off but it does make a huge difference having a good screen to look at.Reply

Not a fan of the S3 but for some reason i kinda like this one.The weight seems rather high,after all most of the time the phone sits in a pocket,hope they get rid of some layers of glass in future models.Maybe by then we also see Corning's Willow Glass and the flexible Atmel touch sensor (not controller) for a thinner bezel.It does feel a bit outdated already with quad Krait devices announced and dual core A15 arriving soon hopefully (Gigaom had some numbers for the A15 based Chromebook and they look impressive)Reply

That 11 million contrast ratio is just amazing; a true testament to the potential of AMOLED.

I could forsee Samsung improving their color calibration standards for the next generation of flagships seeing how they're under considerable pressure from the likes of SLCD2 and Apple's retina display. Paired with this new pentile matrix ultra-high ppi displays in the range of 400 may be possible as well (a la SLCD3)

Looks like next year will be another exciting year for mobile display technology once again.Reply

You can change the colour calibration to be more 'natural' in the TouchWiz software ont eh Note II.

Also, personally I don't see the need for 'more accurate' colours on a phone. Maybe if you are a pro photog who reviews pics on their phone, but otherwise, I love the colourful pop of AMOLED displays. Even the low res pentile AMOLED of my old galaxy S (original...getting the Note 2 soon) looks great for media. Text, not so much, due to the low res and pentile. Reply

Why would colour accuracy ever not be important? I thought the point of a big phone is to make it easier to consume all sorts of media, from websites to photos to movies. Wouldn't more accurate colours be better for all of these activities? To me, it's a bit like saying, I don't see the need to eat delicious food during lunch, or I don't need to be with a beautiful woman on the weekdays. Why settle for something markedly inferior?Reply

Is your screen properly colour calibrated? Are your walls painted in a neutral colour to avoid a colour cast? Are your lamps casting a specified type of light and shielded to avoid glare? Do you use high-quality blinds to prevent sunlight?

This is only a few of the things to consider when dealing with calibration. And a cellphone is unable to deal with any of them unless it stays in the lab.

So for a cellphone the criteria is:Is it bright enough?Does it look pleasing to the eye, overly saturated or not?Reply

Eh, depends what you do with it. I can understand wanting an accurate representation of a photo you're taking.

And given the option between an accurate display and a less accurate display (all other things being equal) I think most people would opt for the more accurate option. Note that I'm not saying they would choose it as better visually (people seem to be suckers for over saturated displays).Reply

So with streaming apps and such, even though the bitrate is low, if they're not very bursty (eg download and fill a big buffer, then wait 30 seconds or minutes, then repeat) they can hold the phone in CELL_DCH on UMTS or the appropriate equivalent on other air interface types, and that's what really burns power. It's time spent in that connected state that really destroys things.

This is actually why I do the tethering test as well (which has a streaming audio component), but I'm beholden to whether or not the review unit that I'm sampled is provisioned for tethering or not, which is the real problem.

and haven't got the thing below 30% in battery life yet, even after using bluetooth audio for a few hours and tracking my location with endomondo, watching movies via 3G (didn't go for the LTE ver here - no point) and so on.

got my USB OTG adapter today and am seeing how long i can play movies off of it for. max brightness and playing off an SD card connected externally.

the screen on this thing is amazing and now my SGS2 is tiny, like a kids toy.Reply

No point in LTE?You may regret that soon, 4G's rolling out as we speak.Was in T-mo store the other day helping mate choose a phone (got S3 i9305, could convince him to get note II) and sales advisor reckons 6 months for Bournemouth.Reply

put a LTE note 2 next to a 3G note 2 and watch youtube/stream netflix and odds are there won't be a difference in anything other than downloading. And that is not going to happen due to EEs anaemic allowanceReply

IMO the menu-home-back button layout is a dealbreaker (as opposed to back-home-recent apps on Nexus/HTC/Motorola devices). It means you have to long-press to access recent apps and you have to remember to look down there to press the menu key even though every other action is on the action bar up top, totally disjointed. Not to mention the menu key is always present and lit up even in apps where it doesn't do anything, like the camera app and Google Reader. Try explaining that to a new user, no wonder so many people choose iPhone, it makes Android seem more confusing than it has to. This combined with the awful look and bloated, overlapping feature set of TouchWiz makes it apparent Samsung has zero handle on UI design or usability. I will gladly buy a Nexus device that they manufacture, but not any of their branded devices.Reply

iOS can be even more convoluted. Case in point, my mom, whom has an old HTC android phone that she uses just fine) called me the other day asking how to do basic things on her new iPad.

Neither is perfect and both have their pros and cons.

Also, have you use the new Note 2? EVery single video/written review I have seen praises the software. Yes, some features are probably never going to be used, but that doesn't harm the experience which, everybody agrees, is for the most part, outstanding.Reply

i dont know about others - but i spend a lot of time copying data (HD films) from my laptop to my phone and my tablet. would be nice to get rid of that extra step (which is huge for me because i use linux which has utterly retarded MTP support)Reply

In a lot of android phones whenever I try to use a stylus and draw a diagonal line in some drawing app, the diagonal line would never be perfectly straight as I'd like. It is always wavy. Try drawing a slow diagonal line in any drawing app and you'd know what I mean. So I wonder if the Note 2 has improved upon this.Reply

That is because they use inaccurate capacitive touch for drawing. This is an active stylus built on Wacom tech, just like full-sized windows tablet PCs and drawing tablets...it won't have that issue.Reply

Brian and Anand have talked about this on their podcast recently. Specifically, the choices you make when creating a benchmark. They try to remove the bottlenecks, via benchmark design, that would unduly stress a certain aspect of the device (ie baseband). Their goal was to get as much of a mix in stressing components as possible. Sounds like a hard task given the very different hardware in these devices. Reply

Since the original, I've been waiting for the update and now that it's finally here I think it's time to upgrade my basic 8525 phone to the next generation "smartphone" and pay the fine..fees that comes along with it. I plan to make the most out of this phone for personal and business.

1. Reading2. Planning3. Office apps4. Music5. Movies6. Map/Travel

Having a larger screen just makes it much more appealing for all the stuff I want to do, especially reading. Just a personal taste mind you.Reply

Please get out the Lumia 920 ASAP! Heh. Until I can play with these phones in person, and likely even then, I'm really on the fence as to what phone to go with. This doesn't happen often with me and tech, but I'm really on the fence between these 2 devices.Reply

There's a severe lack of trolls on the comments section of this review. It's appalling. I miss the trolls that enter the Apple reviews and talk smack about Apple products being toys and the inability for them to be used for any real work. What happened here, guys? Where art thou, troll!?

Of course you could consider this an empirical display of the difference between Apple supporters and Apple haters. The Apple supporters don't seem to feel a compulsive need to wander into a non-Apple thread and tell everyone how much Android, Samsung, Google, AMOLED, S-Pen and TouchWiz all suck.

Either way, yes, a thread that does't feel like a wanna-be gang fight between two groups of 8-year-olds is a pleasant experience!Reply

As owner of a 5" Dell Streak, I'm looking to replace it with another large phone and Note 2 seems just perfect. One question though: can I use another launcher (I don't like TouchWiz) without losing the S-Pen features?Reply

"we load webpages at a fixed interval until the handset dies, with display set at exactly 200 nits as always. The test is performed over both cellular data and WiFi. The new test has decreased pause time between web page loads and a number of JavaScript-heavy pages."

What's the pause time?

In such a test, the system that is fastest to idle will typically result in a lower or lowest power draw through time. One can only interpret the performance of a device relative to other devices when doing the specific test, maybe. No one should be assuming that they'll get 10 hours of wifi/cellular browsing though, whatever time your device of choice gets.

Do humans really do what the battery life test does? I don't know if we're at the point where we are input saturated on how fast we can web browse, but I don't think we're at the saturation point just yet. So, if a phone downloads and renders web pages faster, I think we would just browse more pages in the same given time frame. The devices that burn more power during download and render times may end up with shorter battery life performance simply because a user is browsing more and faster.

You guys are definitely promoting the idea of wider "dynamic range" on battery performance. The battery life test is perhaps a light use case based on my gut feel. Minimally, I think, at least for web browsing, the minimum battery life performance should at be established for devices.

Lighter and lighter browsing workloads would tail off towards standby time. You may want to establish or guess at what the max work rate for humans is while browsing the web, like using an average reading speed or maybe somewhere in the 80th percentile of reading speed.

Obviously, it's a more than one parameter problem with games, GPS, etc, but maybe that can be tackled later.Reply

Of all the smart phones I know about, this is the one I'm most interested in. However, I'm a Windows kind of guy, tried Android briefly and I certainly see why people would choose it over iOS, but in my opinion it's not great. Just my personal view, of course. I'm Windows trained and Windows is the most "intuitive" for me, largely because of that I'm sure.

So, in case anyone from Microsoft is reading - can we get Nokia to make something like this with Win 8 as the OS?

On Verizon? (I have to say though, Verizon's methodology for keeping their phones up-to-date doesn't thrill me. Of course, cell phones, particularly smart phones, are about as private as a house made entirely of screen doors anyway, so I'm not sure that's all that important as things exist today.)

Really, you have a Note 2 without split screen functionality? So you cannot see and work with 2 apps at the same time??Thats weird! Here in Holland I cannot walk the street without seeing billboards showing off this feature.. those Apple fans don't know what hit them.. firstly iOS 6 wich feels like 2010 version of Android for Android users, now this Note 2 can even show 2 apps at the same time, side by side!

Really weird the US versions don't have this firmware yet. But like you said in other reviews, US market is totally different. Here we see Samsung phones, in the shops, there you see AT&T or T-mobile or Verizon phones. Although here in NL almost always sold with subscription, and with the name of your provider on it, at least its an actual Samsung phone and not a T-Mobile phone..Reply

What? They're all still Samsung/HTC/etc branded in the US... What are you going on about? The carriers do meddle with updates and the firmware, but the thing isn't sold as an AT&T Galaxy S or something, it still says Samsung and it's advertised by Samsung (for better or worse, their anti-Apple commercials are almost as bad as Apple's old anti-PC commercials)...

Hell my Sprint HTC EVO 4G LTE doesn't even have Sprint silkscreened anywhere on the front (amazing show of restraint on their part). AT&T's often the worse about branding, they've put the name AND logo on some Moto phones (centered no less).Reply

I expected the battery life to be much better that what the test shows. Specifically the WiFi browsing time of 6 hrs, when I Phone gets 10. I did not see the brightness level set during this test in the article (or did I miss it), given how much of a effect OLED screen brightness has on battery life, I would have liked know the brightness level set.Reply

They said the brightness was at 200 nits. In my opinion that is somehow misleading, because this is almost max for Note 2 or other OLED screens and 1/3 for LCD ones like iPhone 5. Why not doing a test on max brightness?Reply

It's meant to be a standard level to make the numbers directly comparable. Furthermore, it would be unfair to penalise a phone with an exceptionally high brightness by running it at such a level during a test when you'd be unlikely to use that mode all the time in reality.

However, in this instance it does hamper the phone's performance - I run it around the 50% level most of the time and it looks nice and clear that way. However, I wouldn't say it necessarily does so *unfairly*. Just something to bear in mind... additional figures would be nice but time-consuming to obtain.Reply

The longer I spend think about my own subjective limitations, the more I realise that the products from anyone but apple aren't getting a fair go.And this one's an interesting product to attempt to not pigeonhole. I'd think of it more as a media device than a phone. And so does the rest of south korea, as I watch them using these things on the subway -- they watch tv on them. They make calls using earbuds -- not holding a thing this size to their heads. And they rarely put it in their pockets -- it goes in a handbag (or a manbag)The bit about it not fitting in the F-150's "big Gulp" plastic cup holder speaks volumes about the culture it was written in.

Different cultures will use these devices differently. I imagine Samsung won't fret if this isn't taken up in droves in the US, because after all, there's always china.

Also, Anand, et al. *please* give us the ability to mod-down thoughtless comments such as the first one attached to this article.Reply

That's all we need is you bland one mind fits all nazi book burners to demand the ability to wipe out the 1st amendment when you see fit. If you don't like a comment move on, instead of demanding personal power over others.

I didn't like certain things in your comment above, I'd like to wipe it out, we'd all be better for it.Reply

The longer I spend think about my own subjective limitations, the more I realise that the products from anyone but apple aren't getting a fair go.And this one's an interesting product to attempt to not pigeonhole. I'd think of it more as a media device than a phone. And so does the rest of south korea, as I watch them using these things on the subway -- they watch tv on them. They make calls using earbuds -- not holding a thing this size to their heads. And they rarely put it in their pockets -- it goes in a handbag (or a manbag)The bit about it not fitting in the F-150's "big Gulp" plastic cup holder speaks volumes about the culture it was written in.

Different cultures will use these devices differently. I imagine Samsung won't fret if this isn't taken up in droves in the US, because after all, there's always china.

Also, Anand, et al. *please* give us the ability to mod-down thoughtless comments such as the first one attached to this article.Reply

"One of the biggest factors young tech reviewers like myself forget is that visual acuity does diminish with age as the crystalline lens loses its ability to flex and accommodate, thus reducing how close one can focus."

Ha ha, this is an optical engineer's way of explaining that old(er) people need reading glasses :P I had to wikipedia this, but apparently the medical term is "Presbyopia" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbyopia

Every feature that Galaxy Note 2 has, can be found in bigger screen tablets expect for the ability to make calls. The other big screens cost fraction of what Galaxy Note 2 costs. eg : 199 for Google Nexus, 329 for iPad mini. Why pay $700 for this crap Galaxy note 2 ? Reply

Secondly, no, it's not every feature. Pressure sensitive active pen digitizer is not found on any other current ARM tablet, and is a serious plus for some applications, i.e. drawing or even just handwriting. There's a reason it is called Note.Reply

Miniaturisation doesn't come cheap. Fact is, though, they're probably taking decent margins on this too. We can thank Apple for setting up that pricing expectation and capitalism for making sure every other company follows suit.Reply

Brian, as others have pointed out there must be something wrong with your battery tests. All the other reviews on the net show much better performance than what you see which makes sense - this phone has a quite large battery. Maybe you have a defective unit?Reply

There's a reason ford put a rubber tray on the dash - it's for your GN2! At least that's where I put mine while I drive (until I buy a dash mount for it). The GN2 is a bad ass phone, and maybe the novelty of the device has not worn off yet (got it yesterday at release) but I mean, there is something to be said for having the world's most powerful smartphone in your hands! haha eat it suckers Reply

I was probably one of the few thousands of ppl who bought the Dell 5" Streak when they first came out and gigantic phones....not all that great. I got away from them, only for a bajillion other phones to get big.Reply

In my own case, I'm getting the Note 2 because IT TAKES NOTES!!Imagine that !? One of the things it was designed for! The big screenalso makes it easier to stab icons with my bigass finger. Also, movieslook cooler with bigger screens- it's why people buy bigger screens fortheir home theaters...same principle.

Exactly, it fits the small package, big guns, PC insanity clack, which of course every idiot spews incessantly, ignoring the other reality that actually is a fact that the big gun in the big bad ghetto everywhere is toted by the big black packaged...

So much for the small minded retards parading around as the cultural elite minded peak of our society.Reply

I know I'm going to enjoy using the Note 2 more than a smaller device which is the primary concern for me. I currently have the Samsung Vibrant (Galaxy S1) so I'm going to see a huge performance increase just having current technology.

I'm not g33k enough to fully wrap my head around each test that was run. I did see a pattern of the iphone 5 and Droid beating out other phones in the testing. I intensely dislike Apple as a company and find the iphone on the whole to be uninspiring.

Winning on some of the benchmarks isn't going to persuade me to ditch the Note 2.

I wonder if the author or anyone else can put in perspective the overall performance between Note 2 and higher performing devices. Is it a noticeable or just a benchmark number?Reply

While T-Mobile is not generally considered primo, I had the opportunity to understand just how fine their network was while supporting network services for AT&T during the Cingular merger. At that time, our company had a division which provided similar services for T-Mobile, and I got the inside track from my buddies.

So, I really respect the author giving credit where it's due, and writing about a feature such as DC-HSPA+ which techs like me might care about. It reminds me of T-1 modem bonding before Y2K. Big kudos on this point.

Although I can't say this one feature would be enough to make me switch- no single carrier can do it all.

I have a Samsung GS3 and have been pretty unhappy with it for one, annoying reason. When I use it in my car (Infiniti G37, but I've heard the same problem exists in others, including Ford Sync) I have two problems. First, if bluetooth is enabled, it takes preference for audio input, such that I can't use S-Voice (S3's SIri equivalent) to send text, plays songs, use maps... anything). My car doesn't support music over bluetooth, so I plug in to the headphone jack when listening to books or music. When THAT happens, the line out trumps the bluetooth for audio priority, and I can't even use bluetooth for phone calls. The net effect is that I can't use voice commands while driving at all, unless I unplug the line out and disable BT. The other effect is that if I am listening to music or books, and I get a call, I have to reach over and yank out the audio cable in order to take the call. I had to buy off contract, so I paid about $600 for this thing, and these are not problems I've had with my previous Android phones or with iPhones, and I don't understand why I didn't see them mentioned in any reviews.

This all brings me to my point here - I'm thinking of selling my GS3 and getting a Note 2 or maybe an HTC 8X - can anyone here or at Anand confirm if these problems exist in those devices? Does anyone else share my pain with the GS3? Why is this not a bigger deal in the tech media?Reply

That the iPhone 5 is more powerful and has better battery life than the note 2 despite it having a battery 3 times larger and a quad core chip. The A6 must have far superior architecture and you can see how far optimisation goes and googles lack of it. I guess that's the problem that is bound to happen when one company doesn't make both hardware and software.Reply

Just got a new Samsung Galaxy Note 2! Am thrilled!! I have a graphics design salon in New York and use it to doodle ideas while on the go. Then because I'm on AT&T's 4GLTE I send the doodles to myself at home and it’s very cool.Reply

The G-sensor doesn't seem to work when the screen is off.I am using Note 2 Galaxy Samsung.I tried Justflip to flip to turn on the screen. The screen wasn't on at all.Please tell me if the is a fix for this bug.

S-Note is pretty nice looking, and as you say OneNote is feature rich and you've got lots of content in it which you can get at if you install the OneNote Mobile app on your phone.

But what about creating notes using the pen in S-Note? Is there some way to say store those notes in a Dropbox and get at them on the laptop? What would you edit them in? So far, about the only thing I've found is that you can export an image (pdf or jpeg) of the S-note note into dropbox and view the static image on your desktop. That's not so useful.

Is there anything out there that lets one have notes across platforms, that can use the pen, and preferably stores stuff in my existing dropbox account rather than making me pay yet another cloud storage service?

There's Evernote, but it doesn't work directly with S-Note. You can export a static image into Evernote as a sort of final resting place for the note, but this is unfulfilling at best.Reply